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Brandon Parvini demonstrates work done by Ghost Town Media for The Lazarus Effect, as well as his own personal project Haiku0715.

05:06

The Lazarus Effect

07:32

Haiku0715

14:07

Photogrammetry

17:04

X-Particles Tentacles

20:47

X-Particles Liquid

33:56

Octane

37:32

Octane Node Graph

The Haiku0715 project was intended primarily as a test bed for learning both X-Particles and Octane for Cinema 4D. You'll see how Brandon used X-Particles to create both tentacle and fluid effects, baking each component to Alembic when he was satisfied with the simulation. You'll also see how Octane's node editor was used to develop shaders for the project. Brandon also explains the power of photogrammetry to transform multiple photographs into complete models, using tools like Photoscan and acquiring photoscanned models from Ten24.

Transcript

- Hi everyone. I'm Brandon Parvini. I'm the Creative Director and Lead 3D over atGhost Town Media. I want to take you guys through my recent workflows and wrinklesI've been running into for some of the recent projects. Why don't I start us offby-- I'll show you guys some of the recent work we've been doingwith our most recent reel.- Thanks. That's what we've been up to, recently. Bye. For us, we're Cinema4D, full stop. That is really our engine of choice. Up until we found Cinema wewere an After Effects house, bumbling our way along and trying to figure out how toget everything done in 2.5 D. I jumped in and out of platforms, and I'd never reallyfelt at home inside of there. I felt like I was fighting the software. It didn'treally communicate to me. Since I was in 5th grade I was using Photoshop. It had anAdobe-ish feel to me, and it just made sense. The biggest thing for us that wewere able to realize is it allowed us a certain creativity in the process, andthat creativity in the process ends up resulting in the creativity in the finalresult. We don't have large teams. We're big on generalists. You own your shot. Youcome in and you're going to do 13 shots by yourself. You're going to do the modeling,you're going to do the compositing, you're going to do the animation, and if I askyou to, you might have to go pick up coffee too. Although it's usually my job.That idea, that holistic approach to the craft and to experimentation inside of theprojects is really one of the bedrocks for me that Cinema brought to the table forus. There's a certain aspect of play that we're able to have when we're developingand building rigs and things like that. While Cinema classically has beenunderstood as a motion graphics tool, and obviously is widely successful at that,for us it's our foundation. If it's for visual effects, if it's for print,whatever it is, this is our home base. We generate all of our assets out of here,and this is what gives us good content to be able to work with. It was brought to aspecific point when we had the opportunity to work on this project calledThe Lazarus Effect.Where we're having to do a lot of more film-style visual effects pieces,building everything that you'd classically see in other engines, but we had to figureout how to do it our way in Cinema and have it be notable and have it be modularand easy to deal with. This is a rig that I built in three days when we were tryingto get the R and D going for how we wanted to do some of the effects in the filmitself. We'd be combining photogrammetry, 3D scans, all kinds of stuff. Anothermajor aspect that showed up when I was doing that project is the need for beingable to conduct particles in an interesting way. We had to create all ofthe UI for the film before the film was even shot, and they ended up beingstorytelling pieces to explain what was happening with these medical serums thatwere working like this and doing that. I had to be able to conduct the particles ina way that I could say, "okay, in this instance of it the particles can live fora certain amount of time, then die, then turn into this, then do this, then dothat." I'm not a TD. I really don't know what I'm doing with this stuff. I'm not aPython guy, I don't know how to code. But X-Particles came along, and I was like,"well this may or may not make sense, actually." What I was able to do is playaround with the build style. It has a really intuitive approach, which is wildlycomplementary with the way that Cinema works in general. We were able to generateall of our UI and everything just by being able to conduct the particles in a fairlyflexible and adept way. Everything speaks to each other, I can use the MoGraphEffectors on things. Everything was linking up in this really, really nice. Ifelt like, even at the end of it-- I was happy with it, and it was pretty, and Ienjoyed doing it, and it was a lot of fun. I didn't realize how much fun I hadworking with particles, which makes me feel really nerdy. It was fun. I probablycould have kept doing it for a couple more weeks before I started getting itchy.And I was like, "okay, this is great. I wonder what else it could do?" Ifound myself playing around here and there, trying to get different setupsgoing. Okay, can we do fluid sims? Or can we do this, do that? I started playingaround with it a little bit, and the next thing I know, X-Particles 3 comes out.They release a whole slew of new functions and features, and I felt like I hadn'teven tapped in to the initial 40% of what I could have done with it as an engineinside of Cinema. I was like, "I really have to get into this." I found myselfstaring from the outside in. At the same time, around the time X-Particles 3 comesout, there's this really new interesting render engine called Octane that shows up,which is a GPU-based render engine. I found it wildly fascinating. A totallydifferent workflow style, that I'm able to build my own little render farm by walkingaround the office, stealing GPUs and cramming it inside of a system, andsaying, "okay, go." We don't have heavy metal at the office. We don't have racksof CPUs and all kinds of infrastructure that would be really conducive withswinging towards Arnold, which I'm sure a lot of you are hearing a lot about rightnow. It's a brilliant, brilliant render engine, but you have to have theinfrastructure and you have to have the coin to make it work. A lot of theprojects that we do over at Ghost Town, I might be working on it by myself, I mighthave a team of three guys. Maybe I have time to send it off to Rebus or RenderFarm, but maybe I don't. This idea of, "maybe I can make my own little renderfarms, and it's $1,500 to buy some game cards, and I stick it in a system... Ireally should learn what I'm doing with this." I couldn't find a good project,things were going through, and I wasn't finding a good opportunity to test thingsout. I frankly didn't feel battle-tested in the software well enough to know thatI'd feel confident to do it for a paying client. You know, I'm just going to makemy own project. I'm going to do a little short, here, going to figure out how someof this stuff works. Do an expanded version of a daily. If you guys followguys like Raw and Rendered, Beeple, they have these daily projects that they dothat get them into trouble and get them comfortable with a lot of this. For me, Ineeded to make sure that I could actually figure out a problem. Not just, "oh, I cansketch around and make something that looks kind of pretty, but I haven't reallydone any rendered animations or this or that or the other." I wanted to spendenough time to back myself into a corner that I'd have to really understand how toget myself out of a problem if one came up. That's how I trust myself inside ofsoftware. It's not when things are going well, it's when things are going poorly.System just went down. You just lost a GPU. I don't know that licenseisn't working anymore. Those are the moments you lose all of the creative juicefor the project, because you're worrying about all these other things. I want tostop myself down, and we'll show you what I manged to kick out. Spent about fourweeks. Most of it was just waiting for the renders to kick through, because I had acouple old quadras and one titan. If I had a couple of 980s I would have been done intwo or three weeks. This is Haiku 0715. It's a really creative title. I didn'tknow what to call it. I don't find myself that fancy.- Thanks, guys. One of the other things, and this is a bit of a shout outto the Cinema 4D community, when I'd seen what Raul had done for the semi-permanenttitles-- and if you're not familiar, it's awesome, and you're losing out if youhaven't seen it. He made this incredible set of opening titles by himself, inCinema, using Octane, and just killed it. Did the audio, did everything. When I wasgetting ready to do this project, I was like, "I have no excuse. There's no excusenot to do it. I just need to get in there and make some trouble for myself." That'sone of the things that I really do desperately love about the way that thisplatform activates people to just go make something. It's not about waiting forsomeone to come in line and help you get this done, or do that. You get in thereand you do it yourself. Start making something, for god's sakes. I really,really, really enjoy that process, that I feel like I've been activated by thisplatform. One thing that this project taught me is a better way to be patient,to a certain degree. I didn't know what I was doing. I hadn't really done fluid sim.I'm not a Python guy. I don't really know Real Flow. I kind of understoodX-Particles, but I was like, "I really need to get a better sense of this." WhatI had to do in order to have this all make sense is to, like a good chef, prepareeach section of the meal. All the ingredients that I was going to end upadding up and putting together, I had to know they worked individually. I reliedheavily on Alembic, and caching, and I built every single little piece for thisproject by itself. Tested it, made sure it worked, and then baked it. If you don'tuse Alembic for Cinema 4D, try it. The great thing about it is you're almostturning your work into this brilliant, moving piece of clip art. Like, "okay,great. I have it. It's locked. It's done, and it's all encapsulated. I'm not goingto lose a BIN file, I'm not going to lose my cache over here or have a plugin thatdoesn't work over there." I take it, I bake it. It's 10 gigs and I can toss itaround between all my systems. I don't have to worry about what it took to makeit. Now I have a committed piece, and I can move forwardin the production pipeline.I relied on that so heavily inside of this. It was really my saving grace. Letme actually take you guys through some of the different aspects of building thisalp. The face that you see there at the end was actually pulled from a websitecalled Ten 24. They're a photogrammetry house out of the UK, I believe. My bigthing is I'm not a modeler, I don't have the patience for it. I'll hop into Z Brushand things like that. I like getting assets that look good quickly. I'm not apatient man. I just am not. I don't want to sit here and model out a head, andworry about this, and dive into that. I just want it now so I can start doing thefun stuff afterwards. Photogrammetry, 3D scanning are both areas that I'm wildlyinfatuated with. The idea of physical acquisition, of just grabbing myinformation from the real world, bring it in, toss it into the system. I have a goodlooking asset. I would never have been able to sit here and get the pores to lookright, get the little scar that you see on the side of the head. All these things areall free when you're capturing from an actual, real, authentic, analog 3D source.Generally speaking, I always try to go from this-- you can see the point cloudsetup. Let me stop really quickly. Photogrammetry is where I can take anarray of photographs, and there's a piece of software called PhotoScan that willturn it into a point cloud, stitch it all together as a single mesh, and thenre-project the texture from all of the photographs as a diffusion texture. Andyou can also output a normals map, both of which are brilliant for GPU-basedrenderers, because you're doing most of your work with your baseline diffusion andyour normals to create your bump and texture. It makes a lot of sense, itmanages to translate through. You can see this is actually a scan of me that we weredoing at the office.One of my coworkers, David Tourneau, was just walking around with the camerasnapping things off and saying "stop moving." It's a really fun experimentalprocess. The reason I'm bringing this up is, think about your core asset. You mayfind yourself mucking about quite a bit trying to make everything lookinteresting, whereas if you can try to find a good core source of interestingasset to pull from, everything else ends up looking a little bit better.Everything's just a little more interesting. You're not having to reinventthe wheel so much. You're able to stand on the shoulder of a giant, like, "okay, thisalready looks pretty cool in here. What happens if I really start tearing thisthing apart and thrashing it? What happens from there?" I want to show you guys theTen 24 website. This is the face that I used for the end shot. I brought it in,all the 16 K textures, the sub-scattering is all provided. It's 40 Euros. Frankly,for a day of work I'll take that. That's your core asset that you're going to use.It's 100% rig ready. You can take it and get it all up and running pretty quickly.They have an enormous array of assets that you can use as well.Let me take you into the build itself. I feel like I'm delaying theinevitable. What we see here is my live build for the tentacles. I already have itcached. Otherwise it'd be really cool if it'd sim that fast. Still, it's prettygood. All we're seeing here, when you're deconstructing everything down, it's aboutthese really simple, DNA-esque building blocks. I give the particles a command tobe emitted from a section of the skull from a little emitter underneath the roofof the mouth and a little spot over next to the base of the skull. UsingX-Particles, I'm able to say-- let's stop this down and I can take you through someof this. I have a bunch of emitters that I've set up here, and I'll I've done isI've strapped trails to them. That's giving us these nice sweeps. We had apretty cool asset to begin with, and now it looks even gnarlier with all this extradetail on top of it. There's a little patina. Even if the eye can't see all ofthe details there, it knows it's there and is happy that it is. We go here to themodifiers. You can see that I set up-- I'll make this visible. I have a fall offattractor that grabs all the particles, pulls them towards the front. I've set upa couple steps of turbulence to make it a little chaotic. If you guys have ever doneany particle simming, turbulence is one of the first things usually tossed in to makeit a little interesting. This really cool modifier called Follow Surface. FollowSurface will say anything that comes within X or Y range of said object, andfor this one I was pulling from my skull itself, saying anything that gets within Xnumber of inches of the skull, grip it, grab it, and make them walk all over it.All of a sudden I'm being able to course them all over its topology, and I'm nothaving to conduct any crazy voodoo to do there. You can see that I'm using CoverSurface here as well. Little hints of things, subtle little kicks to push theparticles around. Once I had something that was looking pretty good, I was like,"great, awesome." I took it, and I kicked it out as an Alembic.You can see I have my tendrils Alembic file. 2.6 gigs,not very heavy. Everything's encapsulated inone little thing. Always check and make sure that all your proper check boxes arethere. We're going to bring all this in as splines. I could also bring it in as hairif I wanted to, but for right now let's just do splines.Those are nice and sturdy.As I play through here, you can see everything came through just fine. I cango through here now... I have all my generators, I can rip those guys out. Ican say I don't care about any of you in my life. Now I just have that. Now I havea nice, clean, simple item that I can take, drag in. I know if I show it at anymachine, it's just going to work. Simplifying the things that can be simpleis a huge, huge part of being able to loosen up your feet as you're trying tojump around, be creative. You're not having to worry about too much wranglingin the process, because when we're trying to make a lot of this stuff you don'tentirely know what you're doing, you're kind of feeling your way through it. Ifyou can simplify your conversations as you go through it, do it. Get rid of thesimple stuff so you can focus on the fun stuff. The other side of it that we haveis the liquid simulation. I'll play through that real quickly. Again, 100%through X-Particles. Everything's happening inside of Cinema 4D. I haven'thad to leave the platform once yet. You can see we get this nice little pour, it'snice and goopy. I was inspired by the opening title for the Daredevil, if youguys have seen that. That beautiful viscous. Of course, that was Real Flow,and a lot of heavy metal and lifting went into there. I was like, "that's great, Ijust don't know how to do any of that, so I'm going to make my own." I tried divinginto Real Flow, I was watching tutorials, and I was trying to get my head wrappedaround it, and I just wasn't getting results. I can use all of my same artdirection techniques that I have in X-Particles with my fluid simulation. Ihave all this huge of assets that I'm able to play around with that I already knowand feel comfortable with to help art direct my simulations.As it turned out, it only took me about two days to get that done, whichisn't really that bad. I was doing this between other projects, so as soon as Ihad a couple cycles down I could swing over, pluck around, pluck around, hitcache, walk away to another system, keep doing another project, come back, "oh,that looks okay." What I want to show you guys is how straight forward it is to getsomething working. Let me get rid of this, and let's start from a default state. Wehave our happy little skull here. The skull is also provided by Ten 24. Again,cool assets make cool projects. If you've ever done any simming before then youprobably already know this, but if you haven't, low polygon counts. You do notneed to have extra weight in there, as long as it's about the same shop, creatingproxies and simplifying your process will drastically improve all of your sim time.That way you aren't sitting there scratching your head, saying, "why isn'tthis working as fast as I thought it should?" It's pretty straightforward todo. I'm going to duplicate my skull, we'll go over here to our happy little polygonreduction tool, bump it up to 70%. I want this thing tossed way the heck down. I'mgoing to bake my item as a current state to object. You can see we have our littletimer bar, that's making magic happen for you.All right. Great. Now we have it. We can get rid of this other guy, because wedon't need to have him around anymore. Take that guy, rip him out. Get rid ofthat texture. We're going to turn off the viewport visibility and the rendervisibility on this guy. We'll call you our sim skull. Okay? Now we have a much bettermesh. You can see how much lighter it is by comparison to the original. This guywould have been a nightmare to sim with on a not-gnarly box. Now we have our skull.Let's start messing around a little bit. We'll go here to X-Particle. Let's bringin a system so it keeps it nice and organized for us. Here is going to be ouremitter. Let's also not forget, let's turn our sim skull into a collision object.Collider. Liquid doesn't bounce that much, so I'm going to drop that out for rightnow. I'm sure someone will argue with me that yes, that does actually bounce,but... You know what I mean. We have our emitter right here, and what I'm going todo is I'm going to toss in one of my dynamics objects. To keep things simpleI'm going to use their baseline SPH Fluids, which is a really good brute forcetool for most of the sims you're doing. If they're not wildly complex, this guy willdo you just fine. Great. Now that guy's set up. Let's bring this guy up here,let's position him. Rotate him around. All right. Now he's going to be facingdownwards. Shift that over. Seems like it's about aligned up. I'm going to gothrough, and these are some numbers I was playing around with, so I know they kindof work. I'm going to bump my viscosity to 60%, and I'm going to do my smoothingradius to 40 to help smooth out any of the extra, nasty bits that might blob out andwhatnot. All right.Let's take a quick look at how this is coming across. Oh, one otherthing. Something that took me a few times to realize how valuable this is, let'smake our cache object, and this guy is going to be our Grand Central Station forthis, where we'll be building our cache each time. That way...well, look what hedid. He made floating liquid. Let's flip that around. Now we're going the rightway. You know what I'll even do, just to make sure that everything's right in theworld? I'm going to go to my object, emission, I'm gonna kill out any velocitythat's coming from it whatsoever. Then we'll go back over here to my modifiers. Iwant to affect how the motion of it is working. Let's toss in some gravity. Theirdefault works pretty well. It's pretty close to real world matching. Let's goback to our cache, and let's rebuild our cache. We're going to overwrite it,because we didn't care about what we did last time. Now we're getting some nice,gloopy drops. Blop, blop bop.All right, that's not bad. Took me about 45 seconds to get to this point.That's not too bad. There's not enough particles there to get you that nice,thick, viscous drip on everything, so let's crank up our numbers so there's moregoing on. I'm going to get super greedy, and let's go with 6,000. I'm going to takedown my overall timeline. Go back here. We'll overwrite our cache again. Thereason why I'm doing this is because a lot of time when you're looking at sims youdon't want to just look at one angle of it. You want to see 13 different angles ofit and watch through. If you're not caching this as you're going along, you'llhave to wait for it procedurally to click through and try to figure its way through,versus just being able to say, "okay, great. I'm watching it play a couple oftimes, I saw it from a couple of angles, it's doing what I want it to do. Awesome."It's more of iterations and turnover. As you guys saw over my shoulder, all of asudden I created a shower head. The size of my emitter didn't change any. Nothinghas changed about what I'm doing, but now all of a sudden it's buoying out, and it'smissing the skull altogether. This is a trick that I learned watching the RealFlow tutorial. The reason I bring this up is because you can look to othersimulation engines and learn tricks that they're using, and it all will convertback over to our world, because a lot of it's built on the same math. What'shappening here is I've bumped up all these extra particles that are coming through,but I still have this little keyhole that everything's powering out of. Essentiallywhat I've done is I've created a fire hose where the pressure of all the particlesthat are pushing through is coming through at such a high velocity that it's shootingeverywhere and it's becoming explosive. You can cheat that by playing with thedampening inside of the fluid software, but you're cheating a little bit. I foundthis other setup, and it was kind of a duh moment once I realized what I was doing.I'm gonna take a tube, bring that up here. Going to open that up a little bit.Now we've got this nice little ring. I'm going to step through, and I want to giveus a couple height segments, maybe 10. You don't want to add any extra polys, youwant to keep this as light as possible. Then I'm going to take the taper tool,swing it around because it always wants to be facing upwards. Hop back over to it,and I'm going to take my strength to 95. Maybe that's too much. Let's go with 90,see how that's looking. That's looking pretty good. Take them down to like 200.Maybe that's a little aggressive. That's not bad. Bring them down, and as I usuallydo, take it, current state to object, take you, get rid of you. Now I've created afunnel. Now, whatever happens with my particle emission, it doesn't matterbecause I've got this controlling system that's going to force everything downthrough a spigot so I can target what I'm doing. Set it up to a collider, no bounce,because you don't want things splashing. I'm going to grab my emitter and my tube.I'm going to bring them both up a little bit, make sure that I'm aligned. A reallygood way to also do this is, especially with sims-- I don't care with the geometryof that looks like, I know what it is. I'm going to turn it to x-ray so I can seewhat's going on inside of there. Now I can get even more bold with my birthrate,because I'm not concerned with it being even more explosive. Go back halfway hereto my XB cache, and let's build a fresh cache.Hopefully my alignment's good, I didn't think about checking that.Now as everything begins to collect and pool down, now I'm being able to getmuch more of that sinewy drop that we're trying to get in the first place. This isthe fun part, with X-Particles I can do this 13 different ways. If I didn't wantto make so many particles I could have attached the trail sweep to all of this,and all of that could have been part of the final calculation for the skinning tocreate the mesh at the end. But now I can really art direct where things are beingpointed at, and how I want things to look. Now I'm dialing my settings and reallydiving into a lot of that. We spent about five minutes inside of here, and we'realready getting a fluid sim. We didn't have to leave the engine. We're not tryingto worry about all kinds of crazy stuff. You're still here in all the tools thatyou're used to using. For me that's the biggest part. Just being able to sketchand play in places where you already feel safe. Now, because I'm impatient, I'mgoing to go through and see how that looks now.That's not bad. Another cool thing that's happening with the cache isI'm caching to the X-Particle caching format, but you can see that we have BIN,Houdini, Maya, Renderman, Krakatoa, My End Cache, which means that this cache I cantake-- if I send over to the Houdini BIN, I can grab that folder, hop into-- sorry.If I do the Real Flow BIN, I can hop over to Real Flow, load that BIN in as a cache,and it'll start playing through as if I'd simmed the whole thing in Real Flow. Samething with Houdini, all these other items. You're being able to work from where yourcomfortable, but if there's a very specific tool set over here, or you havesomeone who's awesome at this one thing in this one piece of software, say, "okay.Great. Have it, and do your thing. Then give it back to me and make it look evenmore awesome." It's this nice multi-faceted Grand Central Station whereyou're being able to go in and out of a lot of different platforms, but you don'thave to leave if you don't want to. If I want to go through and do the skinninghere, I can go to the generator, bring in the skinner, and I'm going to tell him tolook to our particle mesh. Let's turn that off.All right. Now I've got a skin. It's a little blobby right now, but thankfullythey give us some pretty nice settings that'll help us start cleaning a lot ofthis stuff up. Also I can customize the volume or the size of the particles. If Idrop that down to, say, four... I may have made it angry by doing that.I can go through here and I can customize the size of it. I can go throughand play with my iterations.Continue to fine tune and art direct the look itself. I can go throughhere, I can say, "I'm going to take it to 16." I can cull how the particles arebeing influenced. What's more is I can do different surface algorithms for how Iwant it all to mesh together. Really nice, really multifaceted. You can play aroundand get a lot of stuff pretty quickly. With the time that I have left I want tomake a bit of a segue away from X-Particle and see if I can dive in for just a littlehint of what's going on with Octane. I really, really enjoyed that process ofdiving in there. I've dove in and out of a lot of different render engines, and Inever found myself that at home. I just felt like, "I'd prefer to just stick withthe Cinema 4D renderer. I already have all my textures, I have all my materials. Idon't really want to re-learn this thing." As part of getting used to it, I've beentrying to do a lot of these sketches at night. I have an iMac at home that has anNvidia card, so I've been trying to load things in there, play around with shaders,make little things here and there. Then I was like, "oh, maybe I should learn how todo car stuff in case I do a car project." So loaded some models into here. Built allthe paint shaders. Got everything working. Again, this is all 100% Octane. It's beena lot of sketching and trying to get comfortable with things, which was leadingme towards this project where I was like, "okay. Let's really try to dive in." So wego over to the face build...This is our model that we were talking about previously. Give her asecond. These are some big projects, so...We're going to open up our live viewer window. Again, this is the facefrom Ten 24. The hair was generated from mapping that he supplies you that willtell you where to generate the hair and all that kind of stuff, texture,subsurface. These are all 16K textures, and they're all loading in without much ofan issue. Let's toss this in the viewport. Right now what it's doing is it's bundlingeverything, packaging it up, and deploying it to the GPU itself. While it's loadingeverything over there, I'll take this as an opportunity to talk about thecost-effectiveness of it. You don't really need to be getting a quadro or anythinglike that to do this kind of stuff. Frankly, the best cards for this are gamercards. If you can get your hands on one of the 980s, if you're cool enough that youcan get one of the Titans or Titan Zs, these guys crush through Octane. If youhave a gamer rig at home and you're not playing as much as you used to, rip thatcard out and stick it over here. You'll get really, really fast results. It's alinear stacking process, so the more CUDA cores you have in your system, the fasteryou render. That's all the math it takes. Buy a card based upon how many cores itactually has. Now they're doing it where doing texture overflows and things likethat, so if the textures are really heavy it can spill over to your system. Youdon't even need to have some crazy eight gig card to hold everything. It'll slowyou down a little bit, but it's really about the cores. You can see here, nowwe're over here in Octane. As I orbit around... Let's see here.I bet they probably have a CUDA card in here.There we go. I can navigate around in this environment. Some of the lagginesshere, remember, we're dealing right now with 16K, 8K, 10K textures that aregenerating everything that you're seeing here. One of the biggest things that Ireally enjoyed once I got in there, and I've never been much of a node graph fanin the past, but their execution of their note editor is absolutely brilliant. Idon't know if you guys render the same thing. I haven't memorized every singlefractal noise out there. I don't know, magically, what my gradient setting isgoing to be. I need to see what I'm doing, at some level. The biggest thing they did,and no one else has this in a lot of their node graphs, is if I want to see this, Ican actually see what I'm doing. If I'm combining my textures together, I'mgetting a preview of everything that's happening. I can really quickly and easilygo through and get a sense of what everything is doing to create the finalproduct. If I want to go into here...Let's give the system a second. If I want to go into here and play aroundwith my gamma, let's take them to 1.5. Immediately I'm seeing my results. It'sall instantly updating, and I'm being able to get a really good, nice, fast feedbackfor what it is I'm trying to execute. Okay, great. Now I've made him a littlemore pale. He looks more like a post guy. I can go into here. I'm getting mypreviews and seeing what everything looks like. I can play around with exposures.You can see all of these options that we have. If I want to toss in turbulence, ifI want to generate a lot of items I can have that all here. They have a lot of thesame mapping setups. You can even take a lot of your Cinema 4D procedurals andbring them in here. You can tell Octane on its side to bake it out at 512 to 512, 2Kby 2K, whatever it is it'll go through and keep that-- it'll worry about taking careof everything else under the hood for you so that way you can just get through youriterations. That was the biggest thing for me. I find it takes me a little bit to gothrough a couple iterations and really get a good sense of "okay, this is gettingwhere I want it to be." Versus hoping and praying on buckets that show up in theright way. You want to get a nice GI render, or you're trying to get thesub-surface scattering going, but you want to see what the whole model looks like.You end up doing these little render regions just to see if it works for you.This is a much more artist friendly setup, where I'm being able to play and see allof my resultants as I go about it. I'm not hoping that I come back in 45 minutes andthe GI renderer's kicked out and it looks like something I actually wanted it to doin the first place.I want to show you around this a little bit. My node graph is a littlemessy. I could have done a little bit of clean up before we got in here. You cansee what I'm able to do here-- and I'm actually working with two differentmaterials at the same time through a mix shader. I have my skin gloss, which is myoverall glossiness, and my skin diffuse, which is really how you get a lot of yoursubsurface scattering kicking through the build scene. I could use five moremonitors. That'd be awesome. Let's see here.If I go to my mix material...Come on, little buddy. I have this guy split right down the middle, 50 50.Kind of glossy, kind of diffusey. I can swing him over one direction or the other,and he'll start getting a little more oily or a little more matten, more powdered up.Or if I want to dive in more directly, and really start diving into thebuild that goes into the mix material...This machine might be ready for a restart soon.I can now hop into here, and I can play around with my specific roughness.You can see right now I'm mixing in this roughness shader that's going in. So if Idrop this guy down pretty significantly he's going to be lookinga lot more glossy.There's a nice intuitiveness of being able to play around, and once youget used to a lot of the settings it's a much quicker process. I ended up learningOctane over the course of the better part of three solid weeks where I dove in.There's a website called In Life Thrill. The gentleman there put up this brilliantseries of tutorials. Each one's about 10 to 15 minutes, you learn exactly what youneed. You get in, you get out, and you feel like you have a good grasp on thattopic. Lighting, multipass, the difference between path tracing versus direct. Eachone of these items has a different wrinkle for it, but it's a really good base setupthat you can get through there and get a really good understanding. The best part,they're free. Free stuff's always cool. But if I toss in an arial light, go backover here to my view...Think people have been abusing this computer pretty hard today.Bring him forward.I'm not sure why he's not wanting to be so cooperative with me right now,but... I'll summarize it to this much. I have an iMac at home. It's an I 7, fourcore, and I have a 780 M graphics card on there with four gigs on it. It screams. Ido all of my major builds on that, and then when it's time to render I'll savethe project to my Dropbox and then open up at the office and get it running. It's notsuch a prohibitive curve to get-- there we go. Now he comes back to me, for a seconduntil I look at him. It's not just a cost-prohibitive way to get into a reallystraightforward render engine that you can really quickly get good results. I'm not acharacter animator, I'm not a really deep texture artist, but you come in and itstarts making sense pretty quickly. The ability to get instantaneous feedbackmeans if you're not wildly experienced on it then you can get through moreiterations until you can figure out what it is supposed to look like. That's thegreat part when you get fast feedback. If you don't know what you're doing, you canspend a little more time and tune in those settings and go through all those learningcurves, because you're getting that instantaneous feedback without feelinglike, "okay, I just wasted two evenings in a row waiting for GI renders that didn'twork out for me in the long run."Oh, there we go. Looks who decided to come back and play. I'm going to getrid of my Octane sky, and let's see if we can get that nice guy to react. There heis. For me, it's been a lot of fun to play around inside of this. I would definitely,definitely recommend you guys take a look into it. OTOY has their virtual setupwhere you can go to their site, you can play around with their engine online. Youcan see how quickly it all works around. For me, it's been awesome. I've had a lotof people asking, Arnold or Octane, Arnold or Octane? For me, Octane just made sense.It was a smaller investment to get into it, and I could really quickly see thoseresults. Versus if I'd had a big standing rack of CPUs, then maybe Arnold would havemade more sense. If I'd had the IT and everything over on that side. Really itdepends on what you're trying to do. Because we're really more of a small teamsetup, my preference went over towards Octane, but each person is going to bedifferent. Some of you guys like V-Ray, some of you guys want to stay in standardrender. For me this was a novel approach. I really appreciate anything that throws awrinkle into my old school pipelines, if I possibly can.That brings me to a close. I'll be happy to talk about any of this stuffafterwards if you guys have any more specific questions. I wish I could've doveeven deeper-- I probably could have spent the whole hour just doing sub-surfacescattering and showing you that kind of stuff. It's really easy to get lost,especially-- this is one thing I'll tell you. It's really easy to get lost and losetrack of time when you're getting instantaneous feedback. You keep thinkingthat you're done, and you keep thinking, "okay, that looks pretty good. Actually,what if I tweak that setting? Because it's just another three seconds. It's justanother five seconds. It's just another five minutes." And the next thing I knowit's 3:30 AM, and I have a meeting at 6:00 AM, and I really didn't need to keepmucking around with how glossy the skin was on his forehead or the roughnessshader on his ear, but I really enjoyed doing it. Making work that's fun to workon, you see it in the final result. Finding tools that make you happy is thebiggest thing. Find these elements, these ingredients that you enjoy working with.You can experiment, you can sketch, and you can feel like the process isn't somuch of a burden. That's the biggest thing. Try out all the plugins. Try outeverything you can. Keep mucking about until you find that right cocktail thatspeaks best to you. There's so many brilliant developers right now that aremaking Cinema such a powerful platform. When I'm trying to talk to guys who mayhave been part of the Autodesk family or these different groups, they want to stillsee this as Mograph tool. I'm like, "it's not. It's just a matter of which widgets Iwant to plug into it." It's very much like After Effects in that those who are AfterEffects fans, you use it, you're comfortable with it, it may be a love haterelationship at times, but it's what you know. But it's really brought to life byall the plugins that come into it. Cinema has a very similar aspect where they playvery nicely with all their friends. They're as powerful as the group of peoplewho've been coding and surrounding them, and we're seeing this really nice tippingpoint right now where we're getting access to everything. With the Houdini engine,which is going to absolutely melt your face once you guys start playing aroundwith that. There's not much that I'm not going to be able to do inside of here inthe next couple months. So just play. Play, sketch, and keep making cool stuff.Thank you guys so much, I really appreciate the time.By the way, if you want to find out anything on this project or you want toget in touch with me or Ghost Town, Ghost Town's website's always at G-T-M-V-F-X dotcom. They have a Facebook at G-T-M-V-F-X. And at twitter it's at G-T-M-V-F-X. Let'ssee if I can say it one more time, G-T-M-V-F-X. If you want to find mespecifically, I have my personal site up at alchem dot tv. You can find me onInstagram where you see a bunch of my Octane sketches and things like that thatare going up at Brandon underscore Parvini, and on Twitter. You can alwaystweet me Octane or X-Particle questions. I'm always happy to help people out. Ijust like seeing people make cool stuff. It makes me a little bit crazy and makesme have to go do something else, then. Thank you guys so much. I reallyappreciate your time.

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